ON THE COMPOSITIONALITY OF MEANING

ABSTRACT. Horwich claims that the compositionality of meaning imposes no constraint at all on how the meaning properties of words are constituted. Pagin and Westerståhl maintain that compositionality is the property that the meaning of any complex expression is determined by the meanings of its parts and the way they are put together. Stanley and Szabó put it that an indefinite number of composition rules that vary not just according to linguistic context, but also according to extra-linguistic context, seems in tension with learnability considerations. Partee maintains that if the syntax is sufficiently unconstrained and meanings are sufficiently rich, there seems no doubt that natural languages can be described compositionally.